How Often Should I “Do” SEO?

When you launch a new website, you probably know that you’ll need to spend some time (and money) on search engine optimization (SEO). And you probably know that SEO isn’t a one-time kind of thing, but how often do you really need to do SEO?

All the time. No, really. All the time. SEO isn’t something you can do once or twice or even a few times a year. It is an ongoing process and here’s why:

• Algorithms change:Google’s search algorithms change more than once a day. Most of those changes are small and designed to improve search results by weeding out spam and low quality content, but from time to time Google releases major updates that substantially change the way we do SEO. These updates can significantly change where your site shows up in search results. You need an SEO specialist that understands each update and can ensure that changes to the algorithm won’t negatively impact traffic to your website.

• Your business changes: If you begin to offer a new product or expand your business into a new area, you’ll want to update that information on your website, and you also will want to update your SEO program to correspond with those changes. Your indexable content, keywords, title tags and more will need to be updated.

• You add new content: When you add new content, you’ll likely take the right steps to set the pages up correctly for SEO, but new content can impact old content. So it is important to link old pages to new pages, as well as make sure that pages aren’t competing with each other or buried too far from the home page and more. An SEO company can ensure that your new content gains traction the way it’s intended to by astutely integrating new and existing content.

• Circumstances change: We track SEO on a daily basis for our clients and can actually see changes as they occur; this type of analysis is much harder for individual business owners or marketers to see: there’s a flux of factors that will cause rankings to be gained and lost day after day. Your site may suddenly begin getting great traffic from a specific source that an SEO expert can leverage to get even more traffic.

• Trends change: While this will be a less frequent reason for adjusting your SEO program, it’s worth mentioning. As time goes one, you will naturally need to adjust your SEO program as things like customer behavior changes. Let me give you a few examples. When an area experiences gentrification, it’s not uncommon for new residents, real estate agents and business owners to change the name to something new and exciting, a way of rebranding the area. If your business is in this area, your SEO should be updated accordingly. Or say you run a restaurant and bar that serves both high-end beer and hearty food like chili and fish and chips, and you’ve been doing so for 30 years. All of a sudden there’s this new word for what you’ve been doing since the mid-80s: gastropub – and new ones are popping up all over the place. To stay competitive, your SEO should efforts should be updated.

• You update your site: This one should go without saying, but when doing a redesign or relaunch of your site, you should comb through and evaluate the SEO on each page of your website to ensure that you’re not missing any opportunities for traffic.

There are so many factors to consider in a successful SEO program, such as ranking, lead sources, device traffic, traffic by composition, changes in time on site, new versus returning visitors and more, and they should be assessed on an on-going basis. An SEO professional can help monitor these factors (and others), analyze them against SEO trends across-the-board and in your industry, and make the optimization changes necessary to keep your business competitive.

If you have questions about how SEO can help your business, contact the SEO pros at Marketing RELEVANCE today.